Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have done this many times and if you are sending the redirects to appropriate urls on the other site this is a non issue. I have done it with sites with 100K links. If they were in some way buying non relevant domains and redirecting that would be different.

Hi Mark, I'm just following the thread as I have a similar problem. Would you mind sharing your results from the tests? Thanks, Bogdan

Hi - thank you for your responses and sorry for my very late reply. Appreciate your input on this.  Ruth, the reason for this being in a consideration was because the company wanted to re-brand their customer-facing site (changing to newwebsite.com) but keep oldwebsite.com as a corporate site. The issue of course is that, unless we did a complete domain transfer, we would lose some of the fantastic rankings that have been built up over two years of hard work.  This got me thinking about whether I could give them both, i.e. create subdomain.oldwebsite.com even though the main site has been redirected and transferred. Having thought about that, I wanted to know if anyone had tested this as it seemed like a potential loop-hole, whereby you might be able to have subdomain.oldwebsite.com and newwebsite.com both piggy-backing off the same DA.  But, as you mentioned that DA doesn't transfer that well to subdomains, I guess this may be one reason why. Thankfully, this strange scenario was avoided, as I finally managed to convince them to start a new corporate site on a .net or .org. The corporate site doesn't need to rank particularly, so I got my #1 solution anyway.  The subdomain idea I posted above was a potential backup plan at best, as the CEO didn't look like budging for a while! Thanks again - much appreciated!  Incidentally, I have another question posted here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-not-indexing-xml-sitemap-images.  It's really killing me, so I hope somebody can offer some assistance! Cheers, Mark

Hi, I don't think it is possible to crawl any password protectec pages.  Password protected pages are usually blocked and bots are unable access those pages. And yes it is true that only sites that are publicly and live can be crawled.